Internet service providers, enterprise users, research institutes, and the like, have a high demand for computers, and a working platform that carries the demands for storage, computation, and network is a data center. The data center is equipped with relevant computer devices, and these devices need a large amount of electrical power and corresponding physical spaces for accommodating mechanical and electrical devices as well as other ICT (Information Communication Technology) related devices, e.g., electronic computers, information processing devices, communication devices, and so on. The data center includes lots of heat generating components, including a variety of AC, DC power sources, CPUs, chip circuits, and so on. Generally, the heat generated by a server may be 250-350 W, and the power consumption of a rack loaded with servers may be up to 8-10 kW, so that the power consumption is enormous.
The implementation of the data center includes two parts, building and machinery & electronics. A whole delivery process encompasses procedures such as consultation, design, bidding, building construction, mechanical and electrical device installation, and system debugging. Normally, it takes roughly one year and a half to build a 1000 m2 data center on leveled land. In some cases, if there is a need for increasing the load capacity of the machinery & electronics and the data center at a certain position of the finished data center, it may probably take several more months to implement, and most of the time is spent on the design and construction, such as the laying of pipelines, cables, racks, cooling system, installation and debugging of relevant devices, and acceptance.
Therefore, current data centers are challenged by the fact that the design of each data center takes a long time and standardize the process throughout the construction to the mechanical and electrical design is difficult. Although a quick deployment may be implemented by using a container-type data center, in most design cases, it is still necessary to arrange maintenance of door opening on the body of the container. Therefore, in general, a distance between each or several containers of the same type will be increased, which results in the problems with large coverage area, a long connection distance of pipelines between the container modules, and increased on-site work load and costs.
In addition, the current container-type data center usually adopts a simple design and technique, which is difficult to be compatible with different distribution architectures. In general, a 40 ft container installed with an electrical power device only and integrated with corresponding input and output distribution, UPS, transformer, and so on, merely provides a power of 500 kW at the maximum. Moreover, in terms of the maintenance space for a large-scale electrical device, it is difficult to implement a large-capacity cluster deployment for the container. Meanwhile, each data center unit of the container-type data center needs to be physically isolated, and each data center has a physical distance from each other data centers, and it is difficult to implement a stacked layout of the refrigeration chilled water host, so that the plane layout occupies a large area. Moreover, in case of a large-scale data center layout, the distance between the modules and the data center is increased, which makes the area occupied by the data center too large and not cost effective.